What is the Truth?
As a decision-maker, how do you handle the data you are given throughout the day? You may get it in spreadsheets from multiple people in the company, sent at multiple times, telling you different stories. You may, like a lot of people, just take the data as it comes and then act on it from there. Because let’s be honest, to verify every report for accuracy as it comes in would be painful and inefficient.
But what do you do when Bob in Accounting sends you a financial report that directly conflicts with one you just received from another person in the company? What if this happens a lot, across many different departments, what do you believe?
It’s Not You, It’s Everyone
I’ve worked with data for many years and this is a problem that a lot of companies have. Sometimes it also comes in the form of someone getting comfortable with data that “looks right”. Then an inquisitive employee comes in later and digs into the details. Then to everyone’s dismay, they discover previously reported data that has been used for years has basically been wrong. Not because of any nefarious reasons, but QA sometimes is the first thing to go when people are in a hurry to deliver.
The Future of Big Data
With some guidance, you can craft a data platform that is right for your organization’s needs and gets the most return from your data capital.
Domo knows this stuff happens. To help their users out they created an enhanced governance process to certify what data and cards (visualizations) have been approved. So you can relax knowing your critical data has already been thoroughly reviewed by the proper people in your company.
Get Certified
To do this, you set up a process to how a card or dataset gets certified (ex. goes through Anne, then to Carrie, then to your CFO). There are Department Level Certifications and Company Level Certification that you can create depending on your needs and size of your company. This is important and helpful because once your data and cards have been certified they get a symbol to show what level of certification it has. This doesn’t prevent or slow down the data import process or card building process, people can still create un-certified content at will. But when something needs to be presented to a client or covers some critical piece of business that may get shared around, that content can get vetted out for quality.
So going back to the mismatch report issue from earlier. You notice that the report from Bob shows it has been Company certified. While the other report has no certification. So as a decision-maker you can be confident that using Bob’s data is the truth to run with. And for the issue with data looking right vs being right, if the content has been through multiple SMEs at your company and has been certified, the likelihood of using bad data has now been greatly reduced.
Don’t Get Derailed by Success
Success in Domo brings new challenges. People get very excited at how easy it is to bring in new datasets and create cards, but a few months later you’ll find yourself with junk that may not be worth using. So before you have to restate numbers to a client, reach out to Perficient and we’ll walk you through getting your content back in a place where it is accurate, scalable, and aligns with your business.
Worried about user adoption, there’s a Domo app for that. Click here to learn more.
